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Our historical knowledge has also been advanced by archaeological discoveries. These include excavations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, of synagogues, and of places like Capernaum, Bethsaida, Sepphoris, and Caesarea. Inscriptions and coins, as well as a better knowledge of ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, have helped to overcome both historical skepticism and factual ignorance.

Perhaps the most important recent discovery is that early Christianity was strongly embedded in ancient Judaism, even after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 up to the end of the first century. Among others, evangelical scholars have shown that early Christianity was not a reflection of Greco-Roman paganism, but a development in continuity with the Jewish faith. Nearly all authors in the New Testament have a Jewish background, and ideas that might seem to have a pagan Hellenistic origin could easily have been mediated by monotheistic Jewish-Hellenistic sources.

The discovery of Jewish ossuaries (bone chests in tombs) show just how tied to Greek culture the Jewish people were. Most of these bone chests come from Jerusalem and are dated from between the time of Herod (c. 30 B.C.) and the destruction of the temple (A.D. 70). Although they are Jewish, around 40 percent of them bear Greek inscriptions. This means that many Jerusalemites spoke Greek, while the "Hellenistic" Christian community came, as Acts shows, from Jerusalem itself.

The New Testament is therefore an important source of Jewish history in the first century. The authenticity of the history of the primitive church in Israel, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and as far as Rome, as it is described by Luke, is also seen in the development of its religious thought, its Christology and anthropology as we find them in Paul and John, the basic Christian theologians. These early Christian witnesses are certainly not dependent on half-pagan pre-Christian gnosticism or pagan mystery cults, as skeptical critics claim. Rather, they build their Holy Spirit-inspired and impressive Christian edifice of ideas by using biblical and Jewish building stones. It was in the fertile soil of biblical and Jewish-apocalyptic thought that the early Christian theology of eschatological fulfillment of the prophetic promises grew.

This all too short sketch of new developments in New Testament learning shows how promising the task of further, more extensive biblical research has become. It is now easier than in former decades to disprove the old skeptical prejudices and fantastic overconstructions of modern—in my opinion, uncritical—criticism. But we can do this only by better, more convincing scholarly work, beginning with the basic requirement: a better knowledge of the ancient languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic.

Only by mastering these languages can we read and understand the necessary Jewish, Greco-Roman, and early Christian sources, especially the church fathers, who are the earliest exegetes of the whole Bible. To present the faith to the 21st-century world, we need to support young, gifted scholars who have excellent philological-historical training and possess a broad learning base as well as specialized expertise. The evangelical community needs to free up resources for our scholars.

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October 22 2001, Vol. 45, No. 13